Welcome Ben! The advice given so far is excellent! Good luck with your ongoing personal spiritual discovery and interactions with your family!
sunny23
JoinedPosts by sunny23
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38
First post
by BenRichards ini've been lurking here off and on for a few years, figured i would introduce myself and share the clif notes version of my story.. i'm in my late 30's and was born in.
mom was a jw, dad wasn't.
got baptized in my teens and started dating my eventual wife.
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2596
The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday
by cofty inyesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.
we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.
they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.
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sunny23
Yes DOT maybe I was a bit judgmental to start so im' sorry kassad, i hope you didnt take offense. Kassad, also think of some of your favorite movies. When you see a great movie in the theater, at the end you aren't pissed that the movie didn't last forever. While you are watching its great scenes you aren't depressed and aloof to whats going on because you know it has an end. The same with life. Just because it has an end doesn't automatically make it a "bad movie," you determine it's quality (for those most part aside from environmental influences of course).
Anyway, back to topic...
Unless you change and become as children you will not enter the kingdom of the heavens Mat 18:3
Ruby: I don't see how you offer anything new. Psacramento was claiming that suffering is necessary to individual humans in order to gain experience and thus accountability in order to become like God. Your scripture implies that it is rather lack of experience that allows you appropriate acceptance into Gods kingdom. You also make a strange assumption that this scripture implies God is not omniscient. That goes against christian theology and makes the rest of your answers a non sequitur to this thread
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2596
The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday
by cofty inyesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.
we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.
they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.
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sunny23
if we are to experience these things and go on and disappear into nothingness in a manner in which there is no difference whether we ever existed or not, what good is there in that? kassad84
Kassad, I'm sorry but that is such a narrow minded and selfish view. There are 6 people on this page 114 alone who are telling you they feel joy and great meaning in their existence without an afterlife. If you need an afterlife to have meaning in this life then you will also need an after-afterlife and so on. What happens to your consciousness after you die, does not dictate the meaning and importance of our existence in this very second. Without an afterlife everything you do matters all the much more. It becomes solely about your lasting positive or negative impact on family, friends and potentially the rest of the world to come.
Imagine playing a video game. Any game. You play for hours and with each moment you know you can restart the level, respawn, etc. It becomes monotonous, until you realize you only have a little time left to play for whatever reason you have to leave. That last level, that last respawn, or that last car race, becomes the most important. Every second is crucial and methodically carried out with your devout attention and control of your faculties. It's the same with life. If all atheists took your pessismistic view of pointlessness then there wouldn't be any atheists excelling highly in the arts, humanities, or nobel prize winning scientists, yet there are more than you think.
If this life is truly meaningless in comparisson to eternal blissful afterlife, then all Christians should be rejoicing when someone dies, gets cancer, gets hit by a car, and be extremely jealous of that death and not be sad. If you TRULY believed without a grain of doubt that you will be resurrected to a good afterlife then you would act like this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMaK6k4oZ20&list=UULhtZqdkjshgq8TqwIjMdCQ&index=53
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2596
The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday
by cofty inyesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.
we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.
they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.
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sunny23
Because I can feel Him in my bones.
Or perhaps its your subliminal fear of not having life after death resonating within you? Like Cofty said, many other religious people feel the same way you do towards a God you believe to be false (any God but yours). If one were to invent a new absurd and bogus made-up religion in North Korea, eventually everyone there would believe it and feel it in their bones too :)
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2596
The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday
by cofty inyesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.
we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.
they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.
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sunny23
Psacramento also said: "I don't know why He didn't take away suffering..."
"All I know is that God does allow suffering and I do NOT know why."
Once again, even highly educated theists can't offer a defense. Not even one that convinces them.Ok so you don't know and yet you persist on offering something even you do not agree with. You don't subscribe to the fundamentalist view of "none are above suffering," and you don't subscribe to a "end justifying the means," even if the end is eternal blissful life in a god-like state. So what do you subscribe to?
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2596
The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday
by cofty inyesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.
we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.
they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.
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sunny23
I thought the point was a plausable reason as to why God permits suffering from natural disaters.
Yes, a plausable reason within the constraints of the bible as regards the attributes of Jesus and his teachings about his father. Jesus showed concern and healed people not only as a showy display of his power but out of true love and concern. He healed even non believers. God does NOT act this way according to the example of the tsunami that was a byproduct of Gods design and an incident he could have stopped. You have not listed a "bible approved" reason. This thread wasn't made for deists.
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2596
The Pastor of my Old Church Tried to Re-Convert Me Yesterday
by cofty inyesterday evening my wife and i were invited to friends house for new year's eve.
we met them when i was a christian and we have kept in touch.
they had a few other friends there as well, including the new church pastor and his wife.
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sunny23
Then if the reason is that God thinks suffering is beneficial for growth or any other variation that is horrific when dealing with murderous rapes or large tsunami death tolls, then he is not worthy of worship. Thats the point! The point is not that you are not stating a reason at all PS, it's that you can't state a reason that makes God worthy of worship. The bible doesn't answer this. Logic and proper morals doesn't answer this. God didn't care to let humans know his reasons yet expects them to worship him regardless.
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Is Faith Immoral?
by Coded Logic inwhen people willfully believe something without evidence, or contrary to evidence, are they neglecting thier moral responsibility?
so many people say faith is a virtue but i just can't comprehend why anyone would think that.
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sunny23
Where does that gut feeling of right and wrong come from?
When someone who is raised in a family without God or religion then picks up the bible and reads things out of Leviticus or Deuteronomy (ie honor killings and the like) and then also reads about the Golden Rule in there as well, they are judging with their pre-established brain and sense of right and wrong as to whether to follow these "pearls of wisdom" or not. God is not needed for morals.
The gut feeling of right and wrong comes from our instinctual emotional response to minimize suffering, maximize happiness, and keep propogation foremost. Thanks to natural selection anyway. Notice that animals typically don't kill other animals of the same species but when they do (feuding ant colonies, lions eating cubs who joined a new pride, etc) it is usually justified as defense, territory claims, or some other necessary reason. Outside of that animals dont usually "murder" without cause. They must have learned it from the bible. If it's ingrained by God then God must have failed to ingrain it to an adequate degree in many mass murdering humans. Or as I like to believe, its murderers who lack something biologically to drive them to murder rather than not having been ingrained with enough empathy by God.
I like Terry's analogy on the island and using faith as a tool for survival and positivity and thats great. In some religions, faith can be used as a tool for positivity for many. However I don't see it being a necessary tool for survival. It has however been used as a tool for killing others. Yet the faith iself isn't to be judged as immoral, the action is to be judged as immoral. To label faith alone as immoral is like saying, "computer desk is immoral."
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HOW TO AVOID THE A-HOLE SPIRIT OF SOME HERE...
by DATA-DOG in1) take meds for your megalomania and delusions of grandeur.. .
suggestions welcome.. .
dd.
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sunny23
FHN and AndDontCallmeShirley: watch the first 4:40 of the video i posted on the previous page. 7% is referring to ELITE scientists, not all scientists. Also it's not the exact percent that matters so much as it is the concept of whose arguing with who. NDT says it best.
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HOW TO AVOID THE A-HOLE SPIRIT OF SOME HERE...
by DATA-DOG in1) take meds for your megalomania and delusions of grandeur.. .
suggestions welcome.. .
dd.
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sunny23
What does Mr Astrophysicits Tyson have to say about this? How many scientists are theists vs degrees in education.
Interesting watch, if you would like to see the entire 1.5hr speech it is linked in the descption of this clip but concerning this topic you only need to watch the first 5 min....